Translator: Hugo Wagner Reviewer: Helene Batt
There are many challenges that we face today.
First, there's our mind,
that we have to deal with from sunrise to sunset.
It can be our best friend or our worst enemy.
There are also the challenges we face in our daily lives,
such as insecurity --
the difficulty we sometimes face, just trying to survive.
We have to deal with the economy in the short term,
but also consider in the medium-term our quality of life,
and how to thrive --
throughout our career, with our family, our generation, in our lifetime.
If a country is rich and powerful but its people are miserable --
then what's the point?
There is a new challenge which has come upon us,
almost without our knowledge,
and which, for over a century now, is affecting generations to come.
For the first time in human history,
the fate of future generations closely depends upon our actions.
That's something completely new.
It wasn't a conscious decision,
but our actions have gradually led us to this point.
We're now a bit like this man standing at the edge of Victoria Falls.
It's possible that there's a point of no return,
and this man, with one more step, is going to cross it.
We don't really know where the point of no return is.
In the field of environmental studies,
scientists have defined a certain number of parameters.
You can see them on the screen.
They each have a critical importance
for the future of the biosphere and of our planet,
and thus, for the future of generations to come.
That circle you see is a bit like the edge of Victoria Falls.
Beyond that limit, we don't really know what's going to happen,
but we can expect to reach a point of no return.
This chart depicts the situation in the year 1900 --
not such a long time ago.
In 1950, the so-called Great Acceleration happened.
We went from the Holocene --
a 12,000-year period of a very stable climate
that enabled the development of agriculture
and the growth of civilization --
to the so-called Anthropocene,
the era when humans started to have a major impact --
the biggest impact on our planet.
So hold your breath for a moment --
not for too long,
just long enough to imagine what this next graphic, from 2010, looks like.
As you can see,
we have greatly exceeded the safety limits for some of these parameters.
To give you just one example: biodiversity depletion.
If the extinction of species continues at the current rate,
30% of all species on Earth will have disappeared by 2050.
I'm not just talking about Siberian tigers,
Tasmanian devils and unicorn rhinos,
but thousands and thousands of insects, fish species and amphibians.
The fish population has already decreased by 80% in the oceans.
On December 13,
a bill was passed to prevent deep-sea trawling,
a technique that consists in raking the seabed,
the same way a bulldozer would raze Notre Dame Cathedral.
This is the same seabed that took nature thousands of years to create.
So this is where the real challenge is.
The environmental question is, of course, eminently complex.
But if we think about it,
it is simply a question of altruism and egoism.
If we have any consideration for the generations to come,
we cannot keep doing things this way.
They will think: "You knew, yet you didn't do anything."
We are in the position --
I'm a Marxist, a Groucho-leaning one --
and Groucho said, "Why would I care about the next generations,
what have they done for me?"
That is exactly what we say,
and that is also sadly what the U.S. millionaire Steven Forbes said
on the lovely Fox News channel,
when he was asked about the inexorable rise of sea levels,
"I find it absurd to change my behavior today
for something that will happen in 100 years."
After me, let the flood come.
So we need to face all of these challenges
that encompass, if you look at them closely,
the areas of economy, greed,
solidarity, which is necessary for personal fulfillment,
as well as the areas of altruism and egoism.
Was Plautus right when he said,
"Man is a wolf to his fellow man"?
Hopefully that's not true of everyone.
There are people who are not who we think they are.
Shouldn't we instead talk about the banality of the good
that's woven into our daily actions?
Or perhaps, as Sigmund Freud phrased it:
"I don't pay much attention to good and evil,
but on average, I have uncovered very little good among humans.
As far as I can tell, they are mainly just vermin."
A word to the wise.
Not everyone is that way, though.
We do have empathy.
Take, for example, this man who lost both legs when he was five,
and who, for his entire life, took care of people in need.
These are his parents.
There is also cooperation -- this was taken in the U.S.,
but even when I was living in Bhutanese villages,
you would see that when a house gets built, everyone comes to help.
It's a big party, celebrating the joy of collaboration.
And not only humans share that.
I was asked to mention that this was not photoshopped.
The horse and the goat are indeed friends,
and the goat found that this is a great way to cooperate
to reach the leaves.
There is also of course,
the absolutely merciless struggle for the life of an ice-cream cone.
But "the struggle for life" wasn't actually a Darwinian concept.
He talked a great deal about cooperating
with other human beings beyond our relatives,
and even with other species.
"The struggle for life" was a phrase used by Herbert Spencer --
"Darwin's Bulldog".
It actually turns out that during evolution,
cooperation proved to be more creative
in driving increasing complexity as evolution continued,
and that we, humans, as Martin Novak from Harvard would put it,
we turned out to be "super-cooperators".
That's why we need to reach a higher level of cooperation.
Altruism is not a luxury but a necessity.
It's the social connections we have
that make our existence happy and fulfilled.
They are in fact key factors that determine our quality of life.
And they're not limited to humans.
Here are two 100 year-old Japanese women who live in a place
with the greatest number of 100 year-olds.
And if we ask why -- all the studies have shown
that it's because these people are born, live, and die together.
They always live close to each other.
They care for one another and support each other.
They share each others' joys and sorrows.
So, some people claim: "Man is a wolf to man."
If you look closely, though,
if you scratch the surface of an altruist, it's the egoist who will bleed.
You can always find hidden motives.
People will tell you: "I rescued that person,
and then I was feeling great, it was wonderful."
But do we really tell ourselves,
when we jump into frozen waters to rescue a child:
"I will feel great afterward"?
If you ask people who've done it, they'll tell you:
"But I didn't have a choice, of course I went to help that child!"
So you didn't have a choice, you were like a robot.
That's not altruism, that's instinct.
What does "not having a choice" mean?
It means that the choice is obvious.
The choice is the expression of what you are.
That man didn't ask himself for 30 minutes:
"Should I reach out my arm, or should I not?"
It's spontaneous because it represents who your inner self really is.
There are people like Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda,
as well as the entire village of Chambon-sur-Lignon,
who helped save 3,000 Jews over the span of several years,
by helping them escape to Switzerland, in spite of all the threats
from the German garrison and the Vichy government.
Many lifesavers and righteous people did so while risking their lives
and the lives of their families,
for many months, without expecting anything in return.
No reward of any kind.
Even neighbors would sometimes be suspicious about them.
For years, they wouldn't talk about what they had done,
until people finally found out.
True altruism exists, of course.
But instead of calling altruists saints,
or exceptional human beings,
let's try and rediscover this human kindness within ourselves.
It exists primarily through empathy.
Empathy is an emotional resonance;
it makes us understand, cognitively speaking,
what the other is going through.
Rousseau said: "The wealthy man cannot picture himself a poor man."
Empathy is not enough, though.
If you only reason through the suffering of others,
you will find yourself in a state of emotional exhaustion --
burnout.
60% of nurses in the U.S. suffer from burnout eventually.
We need to add another dimension.
We need warmth, kindness and goodwill,
love that fills every atom of suffering with an atom of love.
And then the burnout disappears.
If there's a gradual reduction in empathy, there is no reduction in altruistic love.
That's what makes a warm aura so helpful.
This aura is an ability we picked up from evolution
through maternal and parental love.
But from that basis we can extend the circle of our altruism,
even to other species --
like this tigress from Calcutta, who raised orphan piglets.
To attain a more altruistic society, we need to start by changing ourselves,
like these spiritual masters,
who spent years and years cultivating compassion.
This is my master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.
Some of his disciples collaborated with neuroscientists
to carry out experiments
in order to study the short and long-term effects
of trained compassion and altruistic love.
First, they studied people who had practiced meditation for 50,000 hours.
They observed profound structural and functional changes
within these individuals' brains -- activations in certain brain regions,
occurring at levels never before seen in neuroscience,
detected by electroencephalogram.
This was taken after a two and a half-hour long MRI --
a functional imaging --
which I had in the U.S., at the lab of Richard Davidson.
He's very relieved the meditator survived it all.
Now let me show you quickly, if you look at the diagram on the left,
you can see meditators that are resting,
as well as meditators that are engaging in mediation on compassion.
Several areas -- more than I can point out --
are highly activated.
On the right side,
you can see novice meditators.
When they're at rest, nothing happens. When they meditate, nothing happens.
That's normal; they're not trained.
But you don't necessarily need 50,000 hours of mediation.
We were able to demonstrate that only 15 days were enough
to bring about changes in the brain, even structural ones.
You can see here the result of a few weeks of meditation at full awareness.
The density of some areas --
like the hippocampus, that handles new phenomena --
is increased through training, even after a small amount of time.
In only two weeks,
you can induce more active and present pro-social behavior.
Only 20 minutes per day.
It even works in pre-schoolers, four and five year-olds.
Over the course of eight weeks, we teach them how to cooperate,
how to share someone else's feelings,
how to be conscious of their breathing.
After eight weeks,
we notice greatly enhanced pro-social behaviors.
And then we let them take the ultimate test --
the sticker test.
They are given 50 stickers,
which they're asked to give to their best friend,
to their least best friend,
to an unknown kid, and to one that is sick.
We do the test before and after the intervention.
At first, they give everything to their best friend;
after the intervention,
the discrimination levels out -- between "my group" and "the other,"
between best friend and least best friend.
Knowing the challenges that discrimination poses in our society,
we can imagine the importance that these very simple interventions could have
if they were used as early as nursery school.
But it's not all bad news.
We can actually progress towards this age of altruism.
Violence has indeed decreased,
though we'd never know by listening to the radio or the TV,
with stories of gunmen armed with AK-47s in Marseille.
And yet, in 1350, there were 100 homicides per year in Oxford per 10,000 inhabitants.
Today, it's 0.7.
It's basically a logarithmic scale.
Today, you are 100 times less likely to die from homicide in Europe.
The levels of violence and abuse against young people have decreased
by 50% in the past 20 years.
We've seen the abolition of torture over the centuries.
The average number of war victims has dropped
from 20,000 to only 1,000 between 1950 and today.
There are of course deadly wars going on in Syria, Sudan, Irak and Iran.
And yet, these places have never been so safe.
So, there is some good news, but it's not enough.
We need to cultivate our inherent ability to be altruistic.
It's a training of the mind.
It's not about sharing the feeling of goodwill for a few minutes.
It's about trying to cultivate it every day for 10 to 15 minutes.
To fill our mental scenery with this altruism,
feeding it when it's fading, reanimating it when we get distracted,
coming back to it -- that is meditation.
We also need points of inflection so that societies may change.
That is the evolution of culture; and it is possible.
There is a need for cooperative education, for a positive economy.
There is a need for lasting harmony, as opposed to impossible progress.
Harmony consists in addressing poverty,
in getting one and a half billion people out of poverty,
and in stopping this absurd consumption at the top,
that's causing global warming.
The U.S. releases 200 times more CO2 than Tanzania;
Qatar, 2,500 times more than Afghanistan.
So perhaps we should start searching
for what Pierre Rabhi calls "a happy sobriety,"
by finding our inner satisfaction,
as opposed to searching externally in vain.
Live together.
As Martin Luther King said:
"We must all learn to live together as brothers,
or we will all perish together as fools. "
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)